In Taking Our Places, renowned Zen teacher Norman Fischer challenges our cultural assumptions about maturity and explores the long neglected topic of what it means to truly take our place in the world.

Taking that place, I have come to feel, is our real job as human beings. We are not generic people, we are individuals, and when we appreciate that fact completely and allow ourselves to embrace it and grow into it fully, we see that taking our unique place in this world is the one thing that gives us a sense of ultimate fulfillment.

Challenged to consider his own sense of maturity while mentoring a group of teenage boys, Fischer started investigating our preconceptions about what it means to be “an adult.” He found that growing older happens whether we like it or not, but maturity must be cultivated. By this he means a true, life-giving maturity where “we truly meet one another—beyond our defenses, beyond our preconceptions, beyond our needs and desires—and open ourselves to each other with the courage to step toward one another.”

Taking Our Places brings Fischer’s longtime Zen practice experience to bear on the topics of really growing up, becoming truly ourselves—and the openness, inspiration, loving heart, stability and persistence that this never-to-be-finished process requires.

What does it really mean to grow up? How do we do the work that will nurture a truly mature heart from which can flow healing words and deeds? Each of our lives depends on our undertaking the exploration that these questions urge us toward. And the mystery is that the whole world depends on each of us to take this human journey.

“Norman Fischer is the mentor we all wished to have. Taking Our Places is wise, compassionate, poetic, and deeply moving. Growing up (at any age) at its best.” —Joseph Goldstein, author, One Dharma

Also by Norman Fischer is Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms.